6.18.2015

Looking at Art on a quiet Thursday. Another trip to the Blanton Museum.

click on the photos to make em bigger.

There is a new show of paintings at the Blanton Museum. I didn't have much to do today so after walking with Studio Dog, and giving a very stinky Studio Dog a bath, I headed over to the UT campus to visit the Art. The show is a retrospective of Caribbean artist, Francisco Oller. The show is entitled "Impressionism and the Caribbean" and it contains some wonderful work by contemporaries of Oller like Monet and Pissaro. It's a fun show. I'll go back again and soak it up next week, if I have an open schedule.

After I see the new shows on the first floor I like to go up to the second floor and see what's shaking. I amble around and look at my favorite stuff. Today, for instance, I was drawn to the Andy Warhol painting of Farrah Fawcett. It's so much fun and if you look closely you can see the screen pattern from the silkscreen. Nice.

There's also a Ben Shahn painting in the permanent collection called, "From That Day On", which deals with the atomic bomb attack on Japan. I like to see it and also "Oil Field Girls, 1940" by Jerry Bywater. The painting collection is an eclectic selection of work from the renaissance to now. It's interrupted here and there by interesting sculpture by people like Louise Nevelson.

Sometimes I just like the concept of looking into a gallery from another gallery. Seeing how a sense sees the division of space. Like the images above and below. Both feel like I am actually looking into the room instead of being a flat piece of art.

I carry a different camera most visits. Today I was in a 50mm mood. I wasn't looking for stretch or compression; I was looking for verisimilitude in the first order. The feeling of seeing something with human point of view and perspective. I shot with the Nikon D610 and the 50mm Sigma Art lens.

That lens is engaging in a way that most optics aren't. Don't care about the numbers but love the way it creates photographs. I'd use it for everything if I could.

Long story short: Go see art. It will effect the way you see and the way you shoot. Mostly for the better.

2 comments:

My parents introduced me to the Delaware Art Museum for art lessons in 1960. I can remember studying the illustrations, and painting style of Howard Pyle. My wife and I have became life members several years ago, and now take our granddaughter's to see both new exhibits, and those same paintings.

The Hyde Museum in Glens Falls, NY has an El Greco portrait of St. James the Less that I visit every time I go there and the Clark Museum in Williamstown, Ma has a few "friends" that I visit every time I go there.

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About Me

I've been photographing since 1974. My first job out of college was Specialist Lecturer in Photography at the University of Texas at Austin, College of Fine Arts. I've worked as a creative director at a regional ad agency and have spent the last 30+ years making my living as a photographer/videographer and writer. I've written five technical books about photography for Amherst Media and I've written one novel about a photographer for the Visual Science Lab. The novel (which you should buy and read) is entitled, The Lisbon Portfolio. I am an instructor on Craftsy.com. My hobby is making portraits. If you don't like what I write go somewhere else and read something you do like.